Naked Came The Phoenix (26 page)

Agatha Christie. Bah.

Caroline stood alone in the crowd of people watching the young policeman jog away in the direction of the dining room and wondered mildly who would be the first to break. She herself felt like a cello string wound beyond tight: Would a slight weakness in the string be where it snapped, or would the bridge itself give way?

It was lucky for Douglas that he did not touch her. As it was, even his tentative pronunciation of her name made her jump as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Had he laid a hand on her arm, she probably would have belted him one.

"What!" she bit off.

"Caroline, I-" he began, then stopped.

He looked wretched, so miserable that she nearly leaned forward into him and wrapped her arms around his chest. Why, oh why did her body persist in this nearly pathological gullibility, this insane trust in a man who had done everything short of striking her? And why, if he was such a feeble excuse for a husband, did he persist in looking so forlorn, so lost, so… lovesick?

"Douglas, what is it?" she cried before she could stop herself.

For a moment it looked as if he might crumble; he started to reach for her, and then with a clash of mental and emotional gears that was almost audible, he stepped back, the impulse to affection violently squelched.

"What on earth… Oh. Oh, my God," she said softly as remembrance cascaded down on her. She'd set out to find Douglas the moment Raoul left her room, but had been interrupted by the discovery of Christopher Lund's death, distracted by yet another round of redundant paramedics, another influx of urgent police, the further jarring festoons of yellow tape across the manicured Phoenix landscape. With her husband's involuntary step away from her, it all came back: that absurd yet primally shattering scenario Raoul had confronted her with, a scenario that was even now inhabiting her husband's mind in its full, raw horror, leaving no room for anything but the overpowering need to protect his wife from knowing that she'd been sleeping with her brother. Setting Douglas free from the all-pervading taint of incest would lift the misery from his face, she knew that. But before she could free him, she had to know one thing.

"Doug, did you sleep with that woman?"

She saw the denial in his face before he could stop it. She also became aware of a number of interested listeners. She took Douglas's knit sleeve and led him away to a bench situated to look over the glittering lake. Neither of them noticed the scenery.

Caroline went straight to the heart of it. "Douglas, you are not my brother."

The impact of these words was too great even to register
on
his face. He simply sat there, gaping at her as if she'd said something in Swahili or Cantonese.

"Doug, I don't know who told you that you were, but Raoul de Vries gave it to me, and I had to laugh in his face. It's true I have a sibling somewhere, but it isn't you."

"Claudia told me. It was Claudia."

"She said it was because of the hand, right?" Caroline reached for her husband's left hand and held it up, lifting her own beside it against the afternoon sky. The length of the fingers was similar, and the separation of the little finger, but nothing else: Her nails, straight thumb, and narrow wrist were from a different genetic heritage than his short nail beds, slim knuckles, and slightly retrograde thumb. "My finger was smashed when I was a kid," she told him, then shivered involuntarily, brushed by the vivid twenty-year-old memory. A furious slam of the cabin door, a soar of pain that didn't stop throbbing until the doctor numbed it days later, and the indelible link it created in her mind between parental anger and great pain. An accident, but Caroline had never whined at her mother again, and she'd often thought the injury laid the foundation for a lifetime of repressed emotion. She shook herself and returned to the present. "We'll have DNA testing if you want, but tell me: Do you really think we could have been brother and sister without knowing it?"

Now his face took on an expression of dawning wonder. "I thought… Oh God, Caroline, I knew I'd never hold you again. That's why I sent you the cello-went looking for it and bought it back to take my place-because I could then feel that if your arms were around it, they were around me, too; that when the body of it rested between your knees…" Douglas seized her hand, put it to his mouth, and began to sob.

Caroline patted his hair absently with her free hand, then said, "Doug? Douglas, sweetheart, I'm sorry, but-
you
bought back my cello?"

He raised his head but laced his left fingers tightly through hers; their wedding bands came together with a faint tap.

"Yes. For you. It cost me a fortune because the woman loved it so much, so I had to pay even more than I thought I would, but it had to be the real one, to set you back on the road you'd been on before I-"

"How much, Doug? I have a reason for asking."

"Thirty-four thousand. Plus shipping."

"Thirty-four? My mother told me she'd paid twelve!"

"God, no. I did ask her to pretend it came from her. I thought you wouldn't accept it otherwise."

"Thirty-four thousand dollars. And she knew I'd have some idea of what a stay at Phoenix cost so she just called it that and pocketed the difference."

"Your mother-" Douglas caught himself, and changed it to, "Your mother is a very strange woman."

My mother, Caroline thought sadly, is a damned monster. Hilda Finch's entire universe is Hilda Finch. Her husband had not mattered; her own daughter was more often than not just one more inconvenience to be manipulated away. The woman was hopeless.

Still, her mother's iniquities did not affect those of Douglas Blessing. Caroline pushed down the urge for adolescent romance, straightened her back, and retrieved her captive hand.

"Douglas, you still have an awful lot of explaining to do. You can begin with those photographs."

As Vince ducked under the tape to approach his group of captive (for the moment) witnesses and suspects, the congressman and his wife began to move away. Vince kept an eye on them, but they didn't go far, and he turned with satisfaction to the pale and ever-thinner group, the idea that officer Mike LeMat had planted shining away in his mind. If these people wanted Agatha Christie, then old Agatha he'd give them. At least for long enough to keep the lot of 'em from bolting for the exit.

"It's three o'clock now, and I want us all to have a meeting after dinner," he announced. The statement caught their attention, he was pleased to see, although these seriously underfed men and women were probably more interested in the possibility of food than the potential revelations of the meeting. In either case, they wouldn't know what hit them. He could almost taste the pepperoni now. The thought made him smile, as did the next part of his suggestion: "How 'bout we get together in the library."

Only one or two of them looked at him suspiciously, but he pretended not to notice. Instead, he told them he wanted each and every person there to write down every little thing he or she'd done since the afternoon before Claudia de Vries had died. Pens and paper were in the dining room (as one, they twitched in reaction to the word "dining," as predictable as old Professor Pavlov's dogs). He added that anyone who wanted to go to his or her room should take a uniformed along, that dinner'd be early, at six-thirty (another twitch), and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Most of them trailed away like a troop of very young school kids, his authority a comforting rock in the pounding surge of fear and confusion. And like school kids, they wouldn't think to object to the completely pointless writing assignment he'd given them. It would keep them busy, all this navel gazing, and who knows-it might actually give him something useful.

Not that Vince would need it. He looked down at the note from the crime scene techs that Mike had brought him on his way to town for junk food and full-sugar soft drinks, and smiled. It was all over but the shouting. And he'd be damned, after the last two days, if he'd let anyone get much shouting in now.

He looked up, startled by the sudden materialization of a great deal of smooth, exquisitely tanned male skin in front of his face. Vince had seen this particular epidermis a number of times now, but he found it no less disconcerting than the first time. The man was just too beautiful to be real.

"Detective, we need to talk," the bodybuilder in the tiny shorts began, but Vince was already looking past him at the two backs he didn't want to disappear on him.

"It'll have to be a little later, Mr. Constanza. I'm kinda busy just now." Vince glanced back to be sure that his uniformed officers were ready, then raised his voice to call, "Er, Mrs. Finch, Dr. de Vries? Could you two come with me for a minute?"

Caroline was just thinking that the bench, though scenic, was hardly the ideal place for a lengthy session of revelations and self-recriminations when she happened to glance over her husband's shoulder at a scene straight out of the evening news. In fact, seeing it enacted on the stage of Phoenix's bucolic landscape made it seem even less real than the televised version: the stereotyped shot of the handcuffed suspect, shoulders hunched against distant camera lenses, a cop's hand steering him by the elbow toward a police cruiser. The bizarre unreality of the scene only grew as she recognized the suspect as Raoul de Vries. And then she saw his companion, also handcuffed, also bent over, also urged forward by uniformed figures. Caroline shot to her feet, cutting dead the abject apologies of the man at her side. Her mother was being arrested.

The minutes that followed later became somewhat confused in Caroline's mind. Douglas had held her back, and Caroline had raged at him, but even as she struggled against his arms and pounded ineffectually at his chest, a part of her had been quite aware that if she truly wanted to go to her mother's rescue, she had only to knee her husband hard and she would be free.

That she had not done so, Caroline reflected later that evening as she pushed around the remaining cake crumbs on her lapis-and-gold dessert plate, indicated both that she had not actually wanted to go to Hilda, and that some part of her had begun to anticipate a future need for Doug's more delicate plumbing. Torn between her mother's version of the truth and her husband's, Caroline's body had known which way her mind, and her heart, had chosen. She had not forced her way to freedom.

Still, there was a heavy load of apprehension and guilt and fury and despair packed into those confusing minutes on the lakeside. Which made it all the odder that, looking back, Caroline's most vivid memory of the entire afternoon was not of the shiny handcuffs riding above her mother's expensively manicured hands; nor of the prisoner's defiant protest at the door to the police car, Hilda irritably shaking off the protective constabulary hand that threatened to mess her coiffure; it was not even the memory of Douglas's strong, satisfying, and-yes-dependable arms encircling her, keeping her from harm.

The image that had stayed with her the rest of the day and through the substantial Italian dinner that followed, an image as crisp and clear as the late afternoon sunlight, was the brief communion of the two people left behind when the arresting officers moved away. The two most unmistakable figures in the whole gathering of strong personalities had stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting until the cars holding Hilda Finch and Raoul de Vries left the compound. And then Caroline, with a blink of astonishment, had watched King David turn and seen Emilio Constanza's arms go around the green-haired rock star, comforting him just as Douglas had been comforting her.

However, not even astonishment could last long, not in the wake of the past few days. Caroline had nestled the side of her face into her husband's shoulder, gazing across the corner of lake at the other pair, feeling nothing but a kind of mindless pleasure at the simple sanity of two humans holding one another.

With that, a third figure had come out of one of the cottages, moving with a quiet, self-controlled dignity that seemed to radiate pain. Lauren Sullivan, her coppery hair blazing as if to deny the soul's aches, had approached the two men. Their arms parted as they gathered her in, and the three of them had stood locked together, oblivious to the world.

Caroline had not seen what broke up the circle, because Douglas had decided the time had come to move on, and when she'd glanced across the water, King David and Lauren had been going slowly toward the cabins, his big hand resting across the nape of the actress's neck. Emilio had remained behind, deep in conversation with Vince Toscana, who had suddenly reared back, seized by some strong emotion resembling outrage. The detective had snatched something that resembled a small book out of Emilio's hand, thrown it to the ground, and stalked away. Constanza had picked the object up, pushed it into a pocket, then followed on Toscana's heels.

"I hate to be prosaic, sweetheart," Douglas had said at that point, "and I know we have to find out what's going on with your mother, but if I don't get something to eat pretty soon I'll starve to-I mean, I'm really hungry."

Pushing away the spotless dessert plate, Caroline now found that she was smiling at the memory: by all means, let us avoid using the word "death" with its air of dark reality. Douglas was a born politician.

"We may have to send your aide to town for a McDonald's," she had told him lightly, adding in saccharine tones, "right before you fire her."

"It's never a good idea to fire somebody who knows too much, darling," Douglas had protested. "Wouldn't it be better if I just found her a job somewhere else?"

"At a higher salary," the politician's wife had suggested.

And in amity at last, looking the very picture of the successful political couple, the Blessings had gone in search of food and information. Food they had found, and information they were about to receive, both of those commodities in greater abundance than they had dared imagine.